Written as letters, cards and scribbled notes, the intimate correspondence between Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein extends across a time of extraordinary social and political change, between 1906 and 1944, and touches lightly on both the weighty and the everyday—holidays, money, dinner invitations, art, family, lovers, travel arrangements, how work goes, or the war.

The correspondence has been carefully edited and is presented by period, each introduced with an outline of significant personal and historical events of the time. Explanatory notres to the letter are rich in background detail. The volume also features photographs, facsmiles of postcard and letters as well as sketches, drawings and painints by Picasso.

Lorna Scott Fox is a journalist, critic and translator presently living in London after 18 years in Mexico and Spain, where she wrote for the local press and produced art catalogue essays, while regularly contributing to the London Review of Books. Her translations from French include Vincent Descombes, Objects of All Sorts (1986; with Jeremy Harding) and her translations from Spanish include Olivier Debroise, David Alfaro Siquieros, Portrait of a Decade (1997) and Rubén Gallo(ed.), The Mexico City Reader (2004).